Data compression has long been recognized as an effective technique to reduce requirements on data storage, data processing, and data transmissions. Among a wide range of existing data compression schemes, lossless data compression is a class of compression methods that compress data while maintaining the data integrity.
In current digital imaging applications, a digital image is often stored, processed, and/or transmitted based upon pixels of the image (hereafter image pixel). Information of the image pixels, such as lumen and chromatic information of image pixels, is often carried by a large quantity of image data, such as 32-bits image data, so as to achieve high fidelity images with accurate colors and brightness. As the sizes and the numbers of image pixels increase, the quantity of the image data representing the image pixels increases. As a consequence, the system requirements, such as the bandwidth, on storing, processing, and/or transmitting image data are increased significantly.
Therefore, what is desired is a data compression method and apparatus capable of performing lossless data compression, especially performing lossless and adaptive compression for image pixel data.